Joana Neves /// What if suddenly nothing else moves?

The beatnik writer William Seward Burroughs (1914 – 1997) had a very peculiar theory about written language, with which he held a relationship worthy of a shaman with his drug – he distrusted and venerated its power, making it his enchanted potion. Manipulation of language through recording machines fascinated him: in recording the temporal sequence of a segment of language, one can then reverse its order and cut its temporal continuum; that is, one may section time. The solution does not just involve the cut-up but fictional writing itself, which turns language into something, into an object, an image (and images are things, a part of the material world).